I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty… because that is the way we humans really are. -Jose Saramago

It has been a long time since my last reading of Woolf. In the past, I have liked her writing, but never felt a connection to it. I first read ‘To the lighthouse’ more than ten years ago, at a time when I was experimenting with a lot of reading, devouring many words, without always…

Charlie Kaufman’s movies are always strange. So, going in for Anomalisa, I was prepared for strangeness – but even then, the strangeness unsettled me, as it was meant to. Kauffman uses the strange to exaggerate the common, but also to better highlight the distance of alienation. In Anomalisa, humans are represented as dolls, a modern day…

When I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth. Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a…

I am a lover of short stories, and I constantly keep my hunt on for them. I enjoy them most in their online form – mostly because I can easily return to these versions. So here is what I think I will do in this post. I will list down all the short stories I find online…

The question of how the Universe began is to me the biggest question of our lives. It is something that puzzles us, astounds us, makes us spend hours pondering, debating with people around, mostly pointlessly. Because we cannot answer this sitting in the drawing room. (Though it is strange that a question of that magnitude…

For at least a couple of years, I have been lazily hunting for Borges’ Ficciones. I believe it was a reference in Alejandro Zambra’s brilliant work Bonsai that triggered this search, something about a story that was so fantastic yet so touching. Though this search has been futile so far, it took me to a…

Kurt Wallander is a grim man. Whether you meet him in books, or in the TV series, you will seldom see him (or read about him) smile. Both Branagh & Henriksson, who have played him in the English & the Swedish series, know this well. In fact, Branagh has even admitted to visiting flower…

I am sometimes embarassed of my interest in holocaust literature. There is something morbid about wanting to read the tales of death chambers, of cattle cars, of people being pulled out of their homes in middle of the night. And yet, it is such a bizarre side of reality – something so humongous and beyond…

Does a misunderstanding or misconception ever correct itself? In stories, misconceptions often place themselves at the center, sometimes spinning the entire tale around. Mostly, in the end, people speak up, and miraculously the fog lifts. Not so in the crisp and stony reality from Thomas Vinterberg. In his movie, he marks out how it is…

Sebald’s characters live in memories and the past – this is perhaps the least kept secret about his books. Their dead keep returning to them, the possibilities of their own deaths continue to haunt them – until they can bear it no more and often embrace that death which has been following them. In Emigrants,…

Incidentally, all of my last few posts have been based on the readings from SF and Fantasy course on Coursera. Things are a little hectic in work and in life otherwise, that I am reading little outside of the course syllabus. The course is coming to a close, and as insightful as it has…

I have very little exposure to psychology and even lesser understanding of the various theories/advancements in the field. However, even in this limited knowledge it is difficult to not come across Freud and his structural model. There is a certain fascination in the idea of the psyche having three distinct identities fighting for control. While…